Page 44 of Boys Who Taint

“Fine, don’t tell me. But at least let me train you.”

“Train me? And what makes you believe you’re qualified?”

“I know what I’m doing. Trust the process,” he replies.

“And what if I get hurt in the ‘process’?” I make quotation marks with my fingers.

“Then I’ll patch you up myself.” He winks. “I have a first-aid certificate.”

No wonder he was the first to jump into the water to save Mavis. Not that it helped, but at least he tried.

Apollo puts the bar right in front of me now and then takes the weights off that he used. “We’ll start slow. Give you some time to adjust to the weight.”

Why does it sound like I’m supposed to get used to the weight of something else entirely?

“Go on. Lift.”

I roll my eyes again. “Fine.”

I grab the bar handles and lift them with both arms, while he begins to circle me, and I can practically feel his eyes ogling my ass.

“Excellent form, Freckles.”

“Thanks, Muscles.”

He raises a brow. “Muscles?”

“Since we’re calling each other by different names, I thought it’d fit.”

“I like it. Better than ’Roid.” He smiles, which is in fact the opposite of what I wanted to achieve. Dammit.

He moves in and adds another set of weight plates. I try to pick it up, but man, is it heavy.

He eyes me up and down. “You look like you’re about five feet, five inches. How much do you weigh?”

“Excuse me?” I frown. “You don’t ask a woman that, especially not a chubbier one.”

“Chubby? C’mon. Juicy is more like it.” He winks.

I blush and tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear to hide it.

“So what is it … one fifty?”

I snort. “I wish.”

“One sixty?”

“Dude …”

He tilts his head, and the veins in his neck nearly pop. “So one sixty-five then?”

“What? How would you even know?”

The smirk slowly growing on his face gives the ruse away.

Shit. I should not have said that.

He grabs a smaller set of dumbbells and puts on the weight plates, then looks me up and down again with those sharp, bright gray eyes, and then adds a few more plates.

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